Understanding and Changing Older Adults' Perceptions and Learning of Social Media
Open accessAbstract
An exploratory study was conducted to answer the following questions: What are older adults' perceptions of social media? What educational strategies can facilitate their learning of social media? A thematic map was developed to illustrate changing perceptions from the initial unanimous, strong negative to the more positive but cautious and to the eventual willingness to actually contribute content. Privacy was the primary concern and key perceptual barrier to adoption. Effective educational strategies were developed to overcome privacy concerns, including: 1) introducing the concepts before introducing the functions; 2) responding to privacy concerns; and 3) making social media personally relevant.
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Previous research has shown that younger and older adults tend to learn in different ways when using technology.
“Previous research has shown that younger and older adults tend to learn in diferent ways when using technology [18,22,55,115].”
From OK Google, Let's Learn: Using Voice User Interfaces for Informal Self-Regulated Learning of Health Topics among Younger and Older Adults (2023) · cites this paper as [115]
The Literature Review compares younger and older adults’ attitudes toward computers and discusses older adults’ learning of technology, but it does not compare how the two age groups learn. The Methods describe participants who were all older adults. Searches for age-related differences in technology learning found no passage establishing the claimed difference. (LLM, conf=0.75)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
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- Authors
- Xie, B., Watkins, I., Golbeck, J., & Huang, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Corresponding author
- Xie, Bo
- ORCID
- Venue
- Educational Gerontology
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2012-04
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 282-296
- ISSN
- 0360-1277 (ISSN-L)
- 1521-0472
- PMC
- PMC3358790
- OpenAlex
- W1972001615
- Cited by
- 195
- References
- 40
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 18 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 17 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 31.14
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Educational Gerontology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (n01lm63502-13-0-1)
- U.S. National Library of Medicine (N01 LM063502)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Demography › Technology Use by Older Adults
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology › Aging and Gerontology Research
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Aging, Elder Care, and Social Issues
- Keywords
- older adults, social media, technology adoption, social media perception, privacy concerns, educational strategies, digital literacy, content contribution, thematic maps, gerontechnology
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